The difficulty of finding friends

The past six weeks have been one deadline after another, which is my poor excuse for not blogging. I will say that my GoFundMe total is just over $2,000 although it doesn’t look that way on the GFM site. But kind individuals have privately sent contributions (that don’t get 7% taken off of them as happens on the site), so I have enough money – 25% of the total – to at least get started. Thank you, all.

Veeka relaxing in her new mermaid-shaped blanket she got for Christmas.

During the past two months, I’ve been substituting at local schools twice a week. Recently, I was teaching a class on primes and Eratosthenes’ sieve. The weird phrases kids have to muddle through with this Common Core curriculum include “identify the factors and product represented in an array” and “solve using the standard algorithm or the distributive property with a number band.” This was for FOURTH grade.
Christmas and New Year’s here was quiet; the first time my father has not been with us. This has been my grimmest year in terms of deaths of friends and acquaintances. Including my dad, there were six. One friend was 43 and two were in their 50s. All had cancer. An old friend from my Portland community days died at the age of 69. My mother keeps on saying that I’m at the age where my friends will start to die and sadly, she’s right.
I am in an à la recherché du temps perdu mood these days. Saw two interesting articles in the Seattle Times about why the natives are moving out and WHY the natives are fleeing. The comment sections in both are worth working through as many of them identify feelings I’ve been having for the past year re Seattle being not the place I once knew. One person talked about moving to the area in the late 1970s, renting an apartment for $220/month and there only being two rush hours. Serious crime was rare, people were friendly and there were actually Republicans (albeit moderates) in office. Sales tax was 5.4 percent.

This Flickr photo by Robert Martin shows the annual Christmas tree lights atop the Space Needle.

Now….(and I quote the writer) you have traffic standstills at all hours in both directions, a U district to University Place drive in rush hour is way past 2 hours, drivers are rude, the sales tax has almost doubled and yet the services are no better. Politically, there is no opposition to one-party rule, political correctness has bred an arrogance, the friendly underbelly of the area has gone, crime is up, the gas tax has now about the highest in the nation but the roads are not equivalent to the price we pay, homelessness is accepted as a God-given right, no thought is given to how plan for growth (just throw up condos and the city collects more tax money), and yes, there is a bigoted side of the far left “progressives” that now inhabit King County at a far greater rate than they used to. There is vile hatred of any non-far left viewpoint. There is no such thing as a “mainstream’ democrat like Scoop Jackson left.
I have to agree. Sometimes I feel like I’m back in DC, although at least there, people dressed nicely! One thing I did do recently was attend a banquet where Mike Huckabee was speaking. Someone gave me a free night of babysitting and told me to find an event to attend, so I heard of this pro-life dinner downtown. Huckabee was cool and he opened with saying he was bringing “a huge welcome from the basket of deplorables in the Midwest.” We all laughed ruefully. He brought up the “child is just an extension of the mother” argument that one hears from organizations like Planned Parenthood. But if that were true, he said, wouldn’t it always have the same DNA and blood type? (Of course we know that children have different blood types. I’m an O-, which neither of my parents are. Blood banks like me because O- is the universal donor and only 9% of the population has it.)

Mike Huckabee at the pro-life dinner in downtown Seattle.

Anyway, it was an interesting crowd and filled with the sort of folks one doesn’t ordinarily run into in this area. One of the speakers asked if there were any elected officials present. Seeing no one raise a hand, he said, “It takes real courage to run for office as a pro-lifer in the Sodom and Gomorrah that is the Pacific Northwest.” There are other places I’d apply the S&G label to faster than Seattle and Portland but it was nice to encounter people who are at least aware of local issues and politics.
I am still going through my scrapbooks and running across memories from high school in the halcyon Seattle of the mid-70s. When I was a senior, I organized Redmond High School’s first road rally, which amazingly got tons of students, faculty and local merchants involved. We even got a write-up in the local paper and even though it was raining heavily, 45 participants helped us raise $100 for the senior class (which was big money in those days). It took place on Oct. 6, 1973, and I plotted out the entire 33-mile route. Not bad, considering my parents wouldn’t let me drive until I was 17.
When my brother Rob accompanied me at one point, we got into a car accident on Avondale Road. (He didn’t see the stop sign, which WAS hidden). I came across a sheet of committee assignments that I’d typed up and I must say, I’m still impressed by my organizational gifts that were just starting to blossom. The road rally stunt helped get me chosen as Girl of the Month by the local Kiwanis.

Veeka strikes a pose while at the annual Christmas lights display at Warm Beach. It was in the 20ºFs, so we didn’t last long.

I also found photos from the July 1973 bicycle trip I took (with 32 other kids) that was sponsored by two Evangelical Covenant churches: Newport and Highland, both in Bellevue. We rode some 220 miles, with stops in Monroe, Lake Stevens, Mt. Vernon, La Conner, then to the Anacortes ferry which we took for 2 days of R&R on Lopez Island. Then took the ferry to Whidbey Island where we stayed at Fort Casey (which is filled with lots of World War II bunkers). Then rode to the Mulkiteo ferry, which we took back to the mainland. Spent the night in Everett, then biked home that afternoon. We appeared (and stayed at) Covenant churches and campgrounds along the way. A magazine article I wrote about the trip for the Covenant Companion was my first published piece. That experience got me started on long-distance biking. The following summer, I biked with that same group to Victoria (BC) and a few years later, I was with a group that biked 800 miles from Washington, DC to Lexington, Ky., for the Bicentennial.
In high school, we had just moved to Seattle from Maryland, where there was so much social ferment. It even affected the Episcopal church we attended in Severna Park, which was close to Annapolis. I found a letter in the scrapbooks from a friend explaining she had left St. Martins (as had numerous other families) because of its emphasis on politics. The Episcopal church got really into the anti-war movement during that time period. What they missed was the burgeoning Jesus movement that was also happening. I returned to that church when I was a junior in high school and challenged the priest as to why, after 5 years there, I had not heard about the Jesus I encountered later in Young Life at Redmond High School. He felt the message had been there but I had not heard it. I didn’t challenge him at the time, but actually, the message wasn’t there. My scrapbook was filled with all the Young Life notices that I designed and helped pass out to other students.
Every so often I return to that world. There was a place out Union Hill Road that we called “Lewises” that had these wonderful Saturday night prayer meetings that everyone went to in the 70s. Tom and Gay Lewis, the couple who founded it, now have Thursday night meetings at their place, which Veeka and I have occasionally attended. They have lovely potlucks beforehand and the property is on a wonderful patch of woods that Veeka loves to wander around, provided she doesn’t encounter the local panther who prowls about. Other than the Lewises themselves, none of my old friends are there. I’ve had to make new friends during our now 17 months here and I can count them on the fingers of one hand. I drive along the freeways here and am so happy to see mountain ranges. And it is so nice to be close to family after 30+ years of living elsewhere. But if I want to be near good friends, I have to drive to Portland. But it beats flying there, as I used to have to do.

3 thoughts on “The difficulty of finding friends”

Julia, thank you for another wonderful post. I just referred to you in a letter to our local paper (Williamson County Sun) because in teaching 4th grade students Greek math you are pushing them out of their boundaries. Texas schools do not.

Hey, Julia – ran across your blog after a search for Redeemer Houston. Had no idea it had had to be pulled down. This led to a load of photographs from the 70s (Yeldall, Cumbrae, etc) and a lot of familiar but much younger faces. It’s always seemed curious to me that the older we get, the more we like to revisit a past blurred by imperfect memory.
I know how it feels to have to make new friends; I’m lousy at it so assuredly you’ll have more success. Be well. (Oh, yeah. I’m the guy who spoke to you about Richard G a few months back. Never did locate him.)